History of the Unreal Engine

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The Epic evolution of gaming's most influential engine, from Gears of War to Mass Effect 2.

By Mike Thomsen

Every good story starts with one person alone in a room deciding to try something new. Tim Sweeney was just twenty-one years old when he designed ZZT, the first official game from Epic Mega Games. Sweeney, then a student at the University of Maryland, had already spent ten years as a novice programmer, but the completion of ZZT was a milestone. In the interim Epic has gone from a bootstrap shareware developer to one of the pre-eminent design studios in the world. They've also led the industry in building one of the most widely-used and recognizable game engines in the world. Their technology has been used for everything from Deus Ex to Harry Potter. During the generational transition to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Epic's Unreal Engine 3 became the development tool of choice for the world's biggest publishers and franchises. This is how it happened.

The ABC's of ZZT ZZT was a shareware puzzle game with simple graphics even by 1991's standards. The game was an abstract dungeon puzzler that had you guiding a small white sprite through a maze of locked doors, treasure, and enemies that often resembled letters of the alphabet. The content of the game wasn't so revolutionary, but it was the approach to programming that would ultimately germinate into something much bigger.

"I wrote ZZT in Turbo Pascal, using an object-oriented programming style, and designed ZZT-OOP to provide easy control over gameplay objects without the complexity of a 'real' language," Sweeney told me. The idea for object-oriented programming, a way of defining quantities of data as an "object" and creating a system for how different objects should respond to one another, dated back to the mid-sixties. By 1991, the games industry was still a relative ether of potential energy. Even the biggest games were made by a handful of people and each new game was basically built from the ground-up in a process that required the precise work of engineers and programmers as much as it did creative daydreamers.

Sweeney's implementation of object-oriented language in ZZT changed all of that. In making it a central part of the game's code he allowed significant user modification above and beyond the simple map editors of the day. More importantly, this approach laid out the conceptual framework for the idea of a game engine.

"ZZT served as a conceptual blueprint for Unreal," Sweeney said. "A game engine with a high-productivity, what-you-see-is-what-you-get tools pipeline, bundled with a programming language aimed at simplifying gameplay logic."

In the intervening years, Sweeney slowly built a reputation for Epic in the primordial ecosystem of shareware games, with titles like Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle, and Jazz Jackrabbit while adding key staff members like Cliff Bleszinski. Steve Polge, and Mark Rein. After the creative explosion around first person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake, Epic began work on their own shooter with 1998's Unreal.

Developed as a serious competitor to id's Quake II, Unreal let players control a marooned prisoner on an alien world, trapped in between warring alien species. The game was arguably the best-looking shooter of its time, handling large, highly detailed indoor and outdoor areas with uncommon ease. Fans of history will enjoy noting that George Broussard was so impressed with Unreal that it prompted him to move development of Duke Nukem Forever from the Quake II engine to Unreal Engine, the very first of many delays in the game's still unfinished production.

Look, I'll Pay You For It The idea of using borrowed technology was not new in 1998. Capcom and Konami had both been recycling internal technology with their various platformer and brawler variations (e.g. DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons Arcade Game). Likewise, id had made its tools available to a carefully selected number of partners (including Valve). As with object-oriented programming, Epic didn't invent the idea of licensing their engine, but they put the idea to better use than anyone had yet done, creating a massive money-maker from the seemingly simple idea.